Climate Change, the Science.

Since this thread has recently taken such a hard turn toward "personal anecdote" territory, I'll just say that the storm looks to be affecting people around here pretty seriously. Maybe not from where you're sitting or from the grand historical perspective, but from my perspective right now.

I'm sure that's so. It's just not (by itself anyway) evidence of AGW, Noreaster's are a phenomenon of the East Coast. You were at UCSD and are now at Woods Hole, right? Welcome to the right coast. If this is your first Noreaster ... welcome to that too. Comes with the turf.

In a bunch of years we maybe can start to do statistics on storm frequency and strength ... but not yet.

What is to cite? Do a google on any coral reef in the world and you'll find that they are all shrinking, losing biodiversity, being over exploited, and otherwise being destroyed. Obviously, some are vanishing faster than others...

I claim that no evidence has been presented and request some. You claim I could find it easily. That is not evidence. I was down in Honduras, and their reefs were fine, as far as I could gather. That's an anecdote.

15 second google search :

The Mesoamerican Reef stretches nearly 1,000 nautical miles from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula to the tropical river that separates the eastern border of Honduras from northern Nicaragua. It is the Western Hemisphere’s longest barrier reef, and its bounty is the necessary foundation for coastal economies in Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. In Belize alone, the reef is estimated to contribute up to 559 million USD in goods and services a year – and it is disappearing.http://epi.yale.edu/epi2012/casestudies ... ican-reef-

report-card. ...

In that same 2010 survey, 38 percent of examined reefs were found to be in “poor” condition, 24 percent “fair,” 6 percent “good,” and only 1 percent “very good.”

... Maybe you saw the 1% that is still healthy. , all coral reefs in the world are facing the same fate. Ie. catastrophic decline.

Your link didn't work. BTW, I do not have a preset position on this reef business, but I do want to see scientific evidence, not anecdotes.

Truly healthy coral communities are now few and far between and in the Caribbean they are a rare commodity indeed. The dual threats of overfishing and organic pollution in particular have led to widespread overgrowth of algae resulting in phase shifts away from traditional coral dominated systems.

This statement ascribes coral reef decline in the Caribbean to overfishing and overgrowth of algae due to organic pollution. So the fish are harvested that help control algae levels. Additionally, organic pollution, mostly sewage and mineral fertilizers flushed into the bays from land, is fertilizing the algae. Therefore, the decline is not being ascribed to global warming effects of rising sea temperatures and falling pH.

I didn't dive down to the biological details underlying these conclusions. Hopefully they are based on sound science. There would be a ginormous pile of administrative garbage spew on top of any sound science.

To the extent we can carry on about nuclear reactors in this thread (there was another big thread about that) I'd agree, European nuclear reactor design and regulation is less "captured" and more conservative.

I don't want to re-enter complex arguments about nuclear reactor design and safety and waste-handling. That old thread could be bumped (if it isn't locked as stale?) or a new one started.

With apologies to Dio82 though, who has made it is working career, I think we are on the cusp of the end of nuclear power as a viable energy source except at high latitudes, simply because solar PV is now too damn cheap to let it survive, if all life-cycle costs are properly accounted. I realize this seems a very aggressive position, but just do the arithmetic, including waste costs.

To the extent we can carry on about nuclear reactors in this thread (there was another big thread about that) I'd agree, European nuclear reactor design and regulation is less "captured" and more conservative.

I don't want to re-enter complex arguments about nuclear reactor design and safety and waste-handling. That old thread could be bumped (if it isn't locked as stale?) or a new one started.

With apologies to Dio82 though, who has made it is working career, I think we are on the cusp of the end of nuclear power as a viable energy source except at high latitudes, simply because solar PV is now too damn cheap to let it survive, if all life-cycle costs are properly accounted. I realize this seems a very aggressive position, but just do the arithmetic, including waste costs.

What Andy says sounds good, but it's not true. The sun doesn't shine at night. We have no effective storage measures. The wind very frequently doesn't blow at night in much of the country. To make wind a viable backup would take tremendous investment in greater transmission capacity that is only used sporadically. I know Andy's opening post for the year in this thread cited papers to the contrary, but a graph in one of those show a tailoff to zero solar/wind electricity before the entire 24-hour day is covered. Those papers are from 2008 or so; where is the build out if they are true?

For some of our electricity, we will need plants that are powered by stored fuel. To do that using natural gas with most of the rest supplied by solar and wind would reduce our carbon footprint. To do that using nuclear would reduce our carbon footprint even more. Nuclear plants could even produce fuel for vehicles, or fuel could be produced by solar and wind and electricity left to hydro and nuclear.

This statement ascribes coral reef decline in the Caribbean to overfishing and overgrowth of algae due to organic pollution. So the fish are harvested that help control algae levels. Additionally, organic pollution, mostly sewage and mineral fertilizers flushed into the bays from land, is fertilizing the algae. Therefore, the decline is not being ascribed to global warming effects of rising sea temperatures and falling pH.

I didn't dive down to the biological details underlying these conclusions. Hopefully they are based on sound science. There would be a ginormous pile of administrative garbage spew on top of any sound science.

Ah, but there is the logical disconnect among climate change deniers. The key in man-made climate change is the 'man-made' part. We over fish the reefs so they cannot sustain balance. We pollute the reefs so the PH changes. We remove predator species such as sea turtles, sharks, and tuna...which allows invasive species such as star fish and jellyfish to proliferate. We even dynamite the reefs and use other destructive methods to farm specific species (which is equivalent to clear cutting a rain forest). A century old coral reef takes but a moment to destroy.

So yes, the fact that all commercial fisheries in the world are under threat is precisely due to human intervention. For example, it was only through sustained human intervention that turned the Gulf of Mexico into a biological dead-zone for fisheries (ie. sucking all the 02 out of the water via industrial agriculture and other pollutants).

This statement ascribes coral reef decline in the Caribbean to overfishing and overgrowth of algae due to organic pollution. So the fish are harvested that help control algae levels. Additionally, organic pollution, mostly sewage and mineral fertilizers flushed into the bays from land, is fertilizing the algae. Therefore, the decline is not being ascribed to global warming effects of rising sea temperatures and falling pH.

I didn't dive down to the biological details underlying these conclusions. Hopefully they are based on sound science. There would be a ginormous pile of administrative garbage spew on top of any sound science.

Ah, but there is the logical disconnect among climate change deniers. The key in man-made climate change is the 'man-made' part. We over fish the reefs so they cannot sustain balance. We pollute the reefs so the PH changes. We even dynamite the reefs and use other destructive methods to farm specific species (which is equivalent to clear cutting a rain forest.

So yes, the fact that all commercial fisheries in the world are under threat is precisely due to human intervention. For example, it was only through sustained human intervention that turned the Gulf of Mexico into a biological dead-zone for fisheries.

No doubt. But we saw a global warming proponent right here ascribe the reef situation to global warming. Those inaccuracies hurt the dialog as much as the garbage spewed by the deniers.

Also, not all the fisheries in the Gulf are extinct. Shrimp come to mind as one not extinct.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the country’s first regional system for capping carbon emissions and creating a market in carbon allowances, proposed a fundamental change on Thursday to increase electrical utilities’ incentive to cut emissions from fossil-fuel plants by raising the cost of compliance.

The regional group proposed a 45 percent reduction next year in the total carbon dioxide emissions allowed. The cut is not as draconian as that number suggests, however, because the new total of 91 million tons reflects the current emissions level after five years of a slumping economy and increases in renewable energy and energy-efficiency measures.

....

If the proposal goes into effect, the analysis done by the group, which is a collaboration of nine states to cut carbon emissions, indicates that by 2020, allowances that are now trading at $1.93 could trade as high as $10. That would be roughly at the level where allowances for California’s new economywide cap-and-trade system were auctioned last fall.

....

States in the group are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.

....

But conservative opponents of such systems were quick to label the proposal a new tax on energy consumers. Americans for Prosperity, one such group, released a statement by Steve Lonegan, its New Jersey state director, saying, “Electricity consumers have been paying a job-killing tax with zero benefit. Now ratepayers in the remaining nine R.G.G.I. states are going to be walloped thanks to this diktat from a bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats.”

New Jersey withdrew from the regional compact after the election of Gov. Chris Christie.

The RGGI consortium and California are instituting meaningful, if limited, cap+trade pricing on CO2 from electricity and California's CO2 accounting is far broader. The Obama administration is rumored to be considering some sort of cap+trade scheme limited to electric power producers -- this appears legally possible by executive-branch action through the authority of the EPA.

.... The Corps reported this week that both lakes were 29 inches below their long-term average and that levels had declined 17 inches since January 2012 alone. The agency said the water levels have been below average for the past 14 years, which is the longest period of sustained below average levels since 1918. Continued record lows are expected for the first few months of this year.

Hydrologically speaking both Michigan and Huron are the same lake (the Straits of Mackinac don't show up well on regional maps but they are nonetheless five miles wide), so it's not exactly a coincidence.

Speaking anecdotally as someone who lives next to Lake Michigan-Huron, we have some rocks right up against the treeline that were put there in the late 90s to help curtail erosion, but which seem rather silly now with the revealed beach + dunes (which some trees are currently attempting to colonize).

I remember vaguely a big brouhaha about water from the Great Lakes system being used to "flush" Chicago's sanitary canal, sustain the Mississippi barge traffic, and a long list of other uses. I don't have time to google it all, but the Great Lakes are "just another reservoir" now. One needs to understand the outflows to argue anything about depositions from water levels......

A key table is #4. They show 90% coverage at $0.09 per kilowatt-hour. To achieve 99.9%, the cost increases to $0.17. This is for storage in electric cars. Hydrogen comes in at $0.10 for 90% and $0.17 for 99.9%. Clearly, 90% is a much more reasonable scenario, cutting costs by almost 50%.

Build out more nuclear for electricity and power cars with hydrogen fuel produced by solar and wind and you have yourself a competitive mix at 0 carbon emission. Easy peasy if nuclear isn't demonized and stigmatized by fashionistas.

A key table is #4. They show 90% coverage at $0.09 per kilowatt-hour. To achieve 99.9%, the cost increases to $0.17. This is for storage in electric cars. Hydrogen comes in at $0.10 for 90% and $0.17 for 99.9%. Clearly, 90% is a much more reasonable scenario, cutting costs by almost 50%.

True... and furthermore I think their cars-as-storage scenario is optimistic.

It's important to note that this study is for regional self-sufficiency of a region which doesn't have very good resources. The fact that it neglects the possibility of imported power makes it vastly over-conservative in my view. In any future where the Atlantic states are deriving anything like 90% of their electric power from wind+solar, there will be long-distance transmission and power coming in from farther west ... crazy not to (over on the soap box it's not acceptable to describe anything in the derisory vernacular as "cray-cray" ... but that would be truly cray-cray.)

Quote:

Build out more nuclear for electricity and power cars with hydrogen fuel produced by solar and wind and you have yourself a competitive mix at 0 carbon emission. Easy peasy if nuclear isn't demonized and stigmatized by fashionistas.

Problem is that nuclear has no chance of paying for itself unless it can deliver "baseline load" AND be paid a premium for doing so. This just makes no sense in a future with large solar + wind penetrations. We've been over this before ... didn't you get it?

Wind energy was the single largest source of new electricity generation capacity in the US during 2012, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). With 13,124 MW of new infrastructure, wind accounted for 42 percent of all new capacity, from renewable sources or otherwise, according to a press release put out by the organization.

The new growth takes America’s total installed wind capacity to 60,007 MW. This is sufficient, by AWEA’s estimation, to meet the electricity needs of 15 million homes. The US remains second to China, which had 62,000 MW of installed wind power at the close of 2011.

....

With 1,826 MW, Texas installed more wind capacity than any other state in 2012; it was followed by California (1,656 MW), Kansas (1,440 MW), and Oklahoma (1,127 MW). Illinois, Iowa, Oregon, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Colorado round out the top 10 states, each installing between approximately 500 and 1,000 MW.

And then if folks want to read it I put a BadAndy rant here about Hermeneutic consistency in science versus Yahoo no-thinking ... and it seems to have been a stone thrown into the water there which didn't even leave a ripple, but perhaps the crowd here might care about this stuff:

Build out more nuclear for electricity and power cars with hydrogen fuel produced by solar and wind and you have yourself a competitive mix at 0 carbon emission. Easy peasy if nuclear isn't demonized and stigmatized by fashionistas.

Problem is that nuclear has no chance of paying for itself unless it can deliver "baseline load" AND be paid a premium for doing so. This just makes no sense in a future with large solar + wind penetrations. We've been over this before ... didn't you get it?

There has been nothing for me to fail to get other than your implacable opposition to nukes. Nuclear comes in now at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour. A carbon tax/cap&trade might make it more cost effective than natural gas. Additionally, natural gas is not going to stay in the vicinity of $0.03-0.05 per kwh forever: the fracking deals were financed in such a way that they couldn't stop bringing in new wells even after there was enough existing production to tank the market; those financial arrangements won't persist.

Biomass chews up even more land and biota (species extinction) than surface mining of coal.

A difficulty with nuclear (and coal) is dealing with uneven loads, but it should be possible to ballast it by producing hydrogen during low load and burning it during peak loads.

BA: Problem is that nuclear has no chance of paying for itself unless it can deliver "baseline load" AND be paid a premium for doing so. This just makes no sense in a future with large solar + wind penetrations.

Shread:A difficulty with nuclear (and coal) is dealing with uneven loads, but it should be possible to ballast it by producing hydrogen during low load and burning it during peak loads.

If you have hydrogen-to-electricity (likely fuel-cells, possibly advanced Combined-cycle generators) peaking power then the hydrogen can come from anywhere. And certainly if the generation is thermal the stationary combustors can handle any mix of hydrogen and methane one likes, too.

If hydrogen as an intermediate storable/pipelineable no-Carbon fuel comes into play then it is inconceivable that there would not be pipeline transport from where-ever, and that would mean from the wind-belts, and from the solar resource in the American southwest. The issue of what produces that hydrogen simply becomes lowest-cost.

Wind (at favorable sites) is the lowest-cost new capacity one can buy right now, far cheaper life-cycle costs than nuclear. There's a reason that more of it was installed last year in the US than any other generating type (and no surprise #2 was natural-gas-fired, some of which are conversions), and zero nuclear plants came on line.

Wind-power installation and uptake is limited right now by issues of getting power from favorable areas to market. The big US (on land) wind belt runs from the Dakotas down to West Texas. You may remember that T. Boone Pickens had a plan where Texas was going to pay him to put in a power line to "open the west texas wind field" (they think and talk in the language of oil about it). Texas didn't bite on Boone's play then ... but what amounts to the same plan is going forward now.

The following is a mild digression from "your point," but I will get back to it, it is relevant:

Texas produces the most wind power of any U.S. state.[1] The wind boom in Texas was assisted by expansion of the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, use of designated Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, expedited transmission construction, and the necessary Public Utility Commission rule-making.[2]Wind power accounted for 6.9% of the electricity generated in Texas during 2011.[3]....Several forces are driving the growth of wind power in Texas: the wind resource in many areas of the state is very large, large projects are relatively easy to site, and the market price for electricity is set by natural gas prices and so is relatively high.[12] The broad scope and geographical extent of wind farms in Texas is considerable: {table not shown here}

....

In July 2008, utility officials gave preliminary approval to a $4.9 billion plan to build new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from West Texas to urban areas such as Dallas. The new plan would be the biggest investment in renewable energy in U.S. history, and would add transmission lines capable of moving about 18,000 megawatts.

One of the factors also promoting West-Texas wind is the Tres Amigas project which will export power to markets to the west, and the combined link together with upgrades in the works right now in California and Nevada will span LA <-> East Texas (specifically Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth). The lines don't care what made the electricity -- the span will carry solar PV from the highest-resource area, and also Colorado River hydro, and fossil as available/needed.

Also note that the existing Pacific-Coast Intertie shuttles power from Bonneville down to LA. Wind-turbine power along the Columbia river is already delivered to LA (and in the future southwest desert solar will go the other way). Via Tres Amigas and the West-Texas lines, the whole West Coast of the US will be linked across the southwest to East Texas. This linkage will cross the areas of highest solar resource in the US, among the best in the world (comparable to the Sahara)

The western and southwestern US is far more favored for solar and wind than the east coast, and the development plans are much farther along there. In a hydrogen power-exchange future they will be very pleased to generate hydrogen and pipe it east. Nuclear power won't compete -- it cannot compete with wind today, cannot compete with Arizona/NewMexico/Mojave solar PV today either. And costs per watt are still going down for both wind and solar (the logarithmic derivative for solar is spectacular still). Where do you think nuclear prices are going?

The east coast lags well behind, and has considerably poorer resources, except for off-shore wind, which is not yet being developed (although there are permits moving along).

When you see and accept that study by Budishak et al., it must be seen as the "last nail in the coffin," because it is demonstrating that wind+solar can achieve very large load penetrations economically in an isolated Atlantic US power-pool, the worst area of the 48 states for resource. (Still a good resource area compared to Germany though, for those of you who are aware of the Fox news idiocy on that topic).

But the idea that somehow the Atlantic coast of the US could or would import no power (either by transmission lines or by pipeline or both) in such a future is absurd, given that the higher-resource areas are building out rapidly right now. (Also projects are in planning for lines to tie the Dakotas to Chicago which is already tied to the big NE grid, to move wind power.)

And then of course we do have a large substantially-amortized "back-up" generating capacity already in place: existing coal-fired plants.

Most coal-fired Rankine-cycle generators can easily change output from 50% to 100% in an hour. They don't run efficiently at low outputs, and starting up from full-cold can take longer. Nonetheless they constitute a near-zero-capital backup/lull capacity for the foreseeable future. And with a large-area grids, improved forecasting (for both wind and solar, and it is getting pretty good after some embarrassments in the early years) and only modest storage even coal-fired backup is easily acceptable in terms of CO2 emissions as long as its duty cycle is kept low.

We don't need to drive electric power generation beyond 90% or so renewable, and it probably isn't economic to do so either. We need to cut total CO2 emissions to about a third of today's ... and to do that we need to decarbonize other sectors of energy usage (and chemical production, particularly cement!), starting with space heating and transportation.

Unless nuclear power can somehow achieve dramatic cost reductions, it's DOA right now in the US. Our wind+solar resource is too good. If it has a future anywhere one would think it is in northern Europe. Well see.

Unless nuclear power can somehow achieve dramatic cost reductions, it's DOA right now in the US. Our wind+solar resource is too good. If it has a future anywhere one would think it is in northern Europe. Well see.

As I said previously, "Nuclear comes in now at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour." Neither wind nor solar are there yet. Nuclear doesn't need cost reductions, solar and wind do.

Unless nuclear power can somehow achieve dramatic cost reductions, it's DOA right now in the US. Our wind+solar resource is too good. If it has a future anywhere one would think it is in northern Europe. Well see.

As I said previously, "Nuclear comes in now at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour." Neither wind nor solar are there yet. Nuclear doesn't need cost reductions, solar and wind do.

German NPPs are the only western power plants capable of reducing power gracefully to house load level upon a grid failure.

Dio82,

I found the above statement interesting. Are there eastern power plants capable of reducing power gracefully to house load level?

Honestly, I am not sure. I know that the Russian designs always had severe problems with their emergency diesels, hence why they need their steam turbines to slowly spin down for 5min and deliver power while the diesels slowly start.

shread wrote:

Quote:

This is due to their significantly more sophisticated automatic plant control systems and significantly higher quality hardware installed in the steam supply system.

Also, what makes the hardware in German NPPs of significantly higher quality? I'm not questioning that it is of higher quality, just wondering what makes it so.

They are all manufactured and serviced according to mid-tier safety classified hardware. There is also significant redundancy in the steam supply system. They are also designed for guaranteed longevity. More importantly though, all that hardware is designed as self-diagnosing systems with automatic fault prevention and fault mitigation. It is simple things like temperature monitors within electric motors being able to change the driving signal programs in order to prevent motor overheating, etc... All of that is missing in US power plants.

As I said previously, "Nuclear comes in now at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour." Neither wind nor solar are there yet. Nuclear doesn't need cost reductions, solar and wind do.

We've been talking about this a long time. In that time nuclear has remained stalled/sluggish, I don't think any of the new designs are actually in service yet. The anticipated costs for nuclear have a big asterisk next to them given that nobody's completed one of the plants yet. Meanwhile solar and wind just keep accelerating. Nuclear's even falling behind in China.

In the time we've been talking about this, you've been apt to interpret observations that nuclear isn't winning as opposition to nuclear, and blamed its poor progress on regulation and the public. Well, at some point you gotta close the deal even if there's disadvantages, and even if you don't agree with solar subsidies, the fact is that in favorable areas solar is on the cusp of kicking fossil fuel off the grid even without subsidies, it's easy to build with vast economies of scale and very tight schedules. Solar projects go from planning to funding to regulatory approval to completion multiple times in the time it takes to build a nuclear plant.

Talk all you want about solar not working at night, but there's a long way to go before that even matters, and I think solar's going to be decisively ahead long before we hit that point.

Wind has a range depending on region of $77.0-112.2/MWh for total system levelized cost.Solar PV has a range of $119.0-238.8/MWh.

For Advanced nuclear it's $107.2-118.7/MWh.

Where the f**k and under what conditions are those claims made about either wind or solar? It's nonsense without having a specific statement of local resource availability.

I browsed through their "assumptions" pdf and couldn't find squat. This is witless for either wind or solar given that there are more than factors of 5 variability in each resource geographically across the US.

As I said previously, "Nuclear comes in now at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour." Neither wind nor solar are there yet. Nuclear doesn't need cost reductions, solar and wind do.

We've been talking about this a long time. In that time nuclear has remained stalled/sluggish, I don't think any of the new designs are actually in service yet. The anticipated costs for nuclear have a big asterisk next to them given that nobody's completed one of the plants yet. Meanwhile solar and wind just keep accelerating. Nuclear's even falling behind in China.

In the time we've been talking about this, you've been apt to interpret observations that nuclear isn't winning as opposition to nuclear, and blamed its poor progress on regulation and the public. Well, at some point you gotta close the deal even if there's disadvantages, and even if you don't agree with solar subsidies, the fact is that in favorable areas solar is on the cusp of kicking fossil fuel off the grid even without subsidies, it's easy to build with vast economies of scale and very tight schedules. Solar projects go from planning to funding to regulatory approval to completion multiple times in the time it takes to build a nuclear plant.

Talk all you want about solar not working at night, but there's a long way to go before that even matters, and I think solar's going to be decisively ahead long before we hit that point.

And Shread bought into the 10 cents/KWH estimates for wind+solar+storage on the east coast in the paper I referenced, and Wind is already considerably cheaper than 0.1 $/Kwh from favorable sites.

Solar is at or below 0.1 $/KWH from the very best sites in the American southwest right now, and scaling down very fast.

And the solar & wind numbers are real numbers -- plants are going in. Their costs and performance can be assessed. The nuclear numbers are vaporware numbers.

Wind has a range depending on region of $77.0-112.2/MWh for total system levelized cost.Solar PV has a range of $119.0-238.8/MWh.

For Advanced nuclear it's $107.2-118.7/MWh.

Where the f**k and under what conditions are those claims made about either wind or solar? It's nonsense without having a specific statement of local resource availability.

I browsed through their "assumptions" pdf and couldn't find squat. This is witless for either wind or solar given that there are more than factors of 5 variability in each resource geographically across the US.

It's buried pretty deep, but there's a fair bit of detail about assumptions regarding wind on page 37 of this document.

Unless nuclear power can somehow achieve dramatic cost reductions, it's DOA right now in the US. Our wind+solar resource is too good. If it has a future anywhere one would think it is in northern Europe. Well see.

As I said previously, "Nuclear comes in now at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour." Neither wind nor solar are there yet. Nuclear doesn't need cost reductions, solar and wind do.

Wind has a range depending on region of $77.0-112.2/MWh for total system levelized cost.Solar PV has a range of $119.0-238.8/MWh.

For Advanced nuclear it's $107.2-118.7/MWh.

Sorry, I should have looked up the latest numbers rather than quote from memory. The average figures are easier to compare, either Table 1 in your link, or the middle column of Table 2. Using that figure, wind is now under $0.10 per kWh ($0.096), while nuclear is above $0.11 ($0.1114) not the $0.10 I quoted. Solar PV is still expensive at $0.1527 per kWh and coal at $0.0977 or $0.1109 for conventional and advanced, respectively.

Wind has slid underneath nuclear in cost. The base load problem still persists.

IMO, the interesting part of the study is the amount of energy storage and excess generation required to get to even 90% of renewable (the random output kind, i.e. wind and solar).

It basically means rebuilding the whole grid and changing the way the electricity market works as well (I don't think suppliers are going to be very happy if they can't sell their production more than 50% of the time).

It's buried pretty deep, but there's a fair bit of detail about assumptions regarding wind on page 37 of this document.

Well, I found that after you pointed to it ... but all it says is that the critical numbers are buried off in files not presented. In principle the calculation of raw solar PV costs per watt are "trivial" (see below), and the complexity of WTF they are doing in comparison is discouraging.

Before getting into what amounts to nit-picks about methodology (or worse, depending on what is buried in those hidden tables) the elephant trying to hide in the bedroom here is WTF is this "advanced nuclear?" Where is it? Show it to me. It's vaporware and RSN. Jeez guys, this is ars ... where you don't get to play fanboi over bogomips of vaporware/RSN vs today's hardware on the table without scathing rebuke. I don't want to play that game at all.

Also .. the study seems to be making some sort of calculation about the fractions of various capacities which can actually be sold into "the" market, and then reflecting that backing into a "cost per watt sold into the market," which is what they appear to really be reporting ... although the prose of the whole thing is utterly opaque as to WTF they are really doing. This kind of thing might or might not make sense in some future energy market scenario, I think this is some sort of simplified surrogate for current power-pool market behavior.

Raw cost per first-year averaged watts is "easy"

C/W = Capacity_Factor * ( Panel_Cost_Per_PeakW + BOS_PerW )

Where BOS = "Balance of Sysrem" Costs per watt. Some of these costs are good hard numbers (inverters, wiring), others get slippery (site acquisition, paperwork and permitting).

And then one needs to go into a LCOE calculation which basically takes into account interest costs, and the life of the panels, and upkeep. The math of this isn't hard but some of the assumptions are slippery. Probably the area where solar has been getting the shortest end of the stick in some calculations is that a lot of studies are making very conservative assumptions about panel/system lifetimes and power output decline, taken from older results ... but again, who knows, can't figure it out from their wad of gooey prose.

Wind has slid underneath nuclear in cost. The base load problem still persists.

"Base load" doesn't exist anymore as any useful concept. It's an advertizing slogan now. If "base load" is taken simply to mean the lowest load experienced over some observational period that is at least a well-defined number, but it is almost an irrelevant number these days. No aggregated generating system we might consider will have trouble meeting it. Think about it.

"Base load" to the old power generating crowd meant "you will pay me EXTRA for the first XXX watts AND guarantee that no competition will take those watts away from me." Power plants got financed on the basis of it and the guarantees of same were enforced by the old state power oligopolies, who are desperately clinging to their authority to do so.

Nobody knows what new-nuclear will cost, Nobody has a clue what new "advanced nuclear" will cost. Bandying cost projections for stuff which are only plans on paper at the moment really does not interest me, particularly as the nuclear indusrtry's history on cost projections and subsequent overruns makes Americas military contractors look very good.

BlueApple wrote:

IMO, the interesting part of the study is the amount of energy storage and excess generation required to get to even 90% of renewable (the random output kind, i.e. wind and solar).

It basically means rebuilding the whole grid and changing the way the electricity market works as well (I don't think suppliers are going to be very happy if they can't sell their production more than 50% of the time).

You are missing a few important points and don't understand the pre-renewable system -- the generation system has always maintained excess capacity larger than that! It must, because it has effectively zero storage. The existing electrical generation system "must" have a margin of safety (including an allowance for plants out of service etc) to meet worst-case peak load, which universally is about 3 PM on a really hot summer day. In reality the system hasn't always met that test of course.

Storage always reduces excess capacity requirements ... duh. And today the aggregate power-generation capacity runs less than 50%, and investors "live with it." However, historically the state regulators have had extensive power to rig which generators get to sell power when demand is low, and at what price. This is the f**king "baseline load" that all the fossil & nuclear power advocates keep arguing is "an unmet need" ... and it is total asinine bullshit, always has been, but today it is increasingly irrelevant practically because modern regional power-pools are eroding the old regulatory command pricing and sourcing control.

Now your specific claim "It basically means rebuilding the whole grid and changing the way the electricity market works as well" ... is WRONG. As to your first point: the whole point of this particular paper is that they do it for the atlantic region and they do it with a lot of storage, and the result is that the grid doesn't get substantially rebuilt. As to your second point, no it doesn't change either, because the US is committed now to rational power-pools by fair auction. The "change" is already forced, renewables are not the only, or even the principal, cause of the change. Now having said this, the nation as a whole is in a very awkward transition at present. It remains balkanized and states still play beggar-thy-neighbor regulatory games, a particular problem on the east coast where some states are small. But this is waning.

In this regard it is important to understand that pools with small numbers of producers competing in an auction are VERY susceptible to bid rigging (including tacit strategies) and various forms of collusion and manipulation. Enron and Dynergy both used very simple strategies of this kind to fleece California of billions of dollars by rigging its imported electricity prices during summer months. The strategies included such simple things as bribing power plants to go off-line at peak demand, etc. In this regard the regulators in the generating areas, particularly including the Texas Regulated Industry Board were aware than Enron was manipulating the market but took no action, nor was any regulator ever charged.

Now, with that out of the way, what the study showed is that using current electrochemical storage technologies an isolated atlantic region could get to 90% or even 99.9% at "reasonable" costs. As one drives this fraction up obviously both over-capacity increase and storage increase and the optimization of storage vs capacity changes ... no surprise.

But this solution is far less attractive than an obvious alternative which does substantially improve some combination of grid and pipelines, so that the atlantic coast isn't an isolated region.

The rate of progress in transmission and storage and combined transmisson+storage is very high, and will be a "game changer" in the long run, but hard to entirely predict. A few things are obvious though:

* We have the technology today (HVDC transmission) to move electricity coast-to-coast if we want to, with losses around 10% at the economic optimization (more wire reduces ohmic losses but increases capital costs). The cost of transmission is highly non-linear with capacity (ROW costs and support infrastructure change little as line capacity goes up)

* superconducting technology is coming in ... tradeoffs are interesting and likely to change quickly. capacity scaling is particularly non-linear for superconducting lines: they clearly win today at very large capacities.

* The alternative to transmitting electricity is to produce a chemical from it, "transmit" that via a pipeline. The advantage of this is automatically storage capability is now nearly intrinsic. The disadvantage is the efficiency losses. The best chemical systems look around 70% efficient in cycle cost ... so if there is an instantaneous load somewhere which can buy the electricity ... better to do electrical transmission.

I am agnostic about what the future will hold about the tradeoffs of long-range electrical power distribution, vs chemi-transmission, vs local production and storage. I think that politics, including the worst sort of "captive customer" and "beggar thy neighbor" regulatory behaviors by states may affect this in ways that produce far from optimal solutions.

In this regard note that the failed HR2454 contained language that would have further broken down states' authority to impede the importation of electricity and protect in-state generators from out-of-state competition. A collection of north-east states objected and their governors sent a letter to the senate attempting to "opt out" ... i.e. disconnect themselves.

The paper in discussion here effectively bows down to the belief that the balkanization will prevail, as an input assumption.

The proper understanding of this paper is that wind and solar can still get the job done at what looks like a pretty reasonable price, even in the worst region of the US, and with the stupidest dog-in-the-manger regulatory exclusion of better alternatives. But those better alternatives WILL mean major investments in transmission, which other parts of the country are already starting to make.

IMO, the interesting part of the study is the amount of energy storage and excess generation required to get to even 90% of renewable (the random output kind, i.e. wind and solar).

It basically means rebuilding the whole grid and changing the way the electricity market works as well (I don't think suppliers are going to be very happy if they can't sell their production more than 50% of the time).

You are missing a few important points and don't understand the pre-renewable system -- the generation system has always maintained excess capacity larger than that! It must, because it has effectively zero storage. The existing electrical generation system "must" have a margin of safety (including an allowance for plants out of service etc) to meet worst-case peak load, which universally is about 3 PM on a really hot summer day. In reality the system hasn't always met that test of course.

Wind has slid underneath nuclear in cost. The base load problem still persists.

"Base load" doesn't exist anymore as any useful concept. It's an advertizing slogan now. If "base load" is taken simply to mean the lowest load experienced over some observational period that is at least a well-defined number, but it is almost an irrelevant number these days. No aggregated generating system we might consider will have trouble meeting it. Think about it.

"Base load" to the old power generating crowd meant "you will pay me EXTRA for the first XXX watts AND guarantee that no competition will take those watts away from me." Power plants got financed on the basis of it and the guarantees of same were enforced by the old state power oligopolies, who are desperately clinging to their authority to do so.

Nobody knows what new-nuclear will cost, Nobody has a clue what new "advanced nuclear" will cost. Bandying cost projections for stuff which are only plans on paper at the moment really does not interest me, particularly as the nuclear indusrtry's history on cost projections and subsequent overruns makes Americas military contractors look very good.

There is some amount of electricity that has to be available 24/7, barring hurricanes, etc. Enough to run the heating system in people's houses, etc. 90% coverage by solar and wind at $0.10 per kWh, more or less, is not going to run those heating systems. That is base load if you will allow my definition. If you want to fuss about the terminology, then call it something else. It's a problem and will not go away because you have redefined the term we try to use to refer to it.

The cost projections for various fuels are in the citation you are arguing about with nummycakes. I would hazard that you are arguing because you don't like the projections for nuclear and solar. There is uncertainty associated with projections. However, you cannot reject them by saying "nobody knows what new nuclear will cost." The cost is known within the uncertainty given by nummycakes' citation. Yes we don't know what nuclear will cost, but we expect it will cost $0.11 per kWh.

I wouldn't have expected this repartee from you. It's on par with "explain to me how 0.3% of the atmosphere can affect anything."

The salient point here is that we are not talking about comparing some off-gridder versus Con Ed. And we should not be talking about morons who cannot do basic statistics or won't be bothered or won't accept the results.

This issue is obvious: do the statistics, ARGUE FROM THE DATA, not from Joe Burton "You can't interfere with God" talking points.

The Budishack et al. paper does this, for the Atlantic region. Lots of other papers have pointed out the basics of it though:

* wind and solar are statistically-complementary. Yeah, the sun doesn't shine at night. I knew that. I would have thought that you accepted that I knew that?

Those who argue against wind and solar seem to always come back to "the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow." Thinking about some miserable cold still night for some pathetic off-gridder. But the wind is blowing somewhere else ,,, is that in your grid or not? There aren't all that many really still nights over large areas, and TODAY the electricity used in those conditions is low, because almost nobody heats with electric heat -- too expensive.

In some future where we attempt to decarbonize space heating ... story may be somewhat different. But Jeez, insulation works. One can build totally passive homes anywhere in the 48 states as far as heating is (not) required.

And then of course heat (or cold) can be stored. That's not hard. It's pretty standard for large buildings in cities that charge peak pricing to store "cold" which has been produced by chillers using off-peak electricity.

[There is some amount of electricity that has to be available 24/7, barring hurricanes, etc. Enough to run the heating system in people's houses, etc. 90% coverage by solar and wind at $0.10 per kWh, more or less, is not going to run those heating systems. That is base load if you will allow my definition. If you want to fuss about the terminology, then call it something else. It's a problem and will not go away because you have redefined the term we try to use to refer to it.

That load is LOW. And it isn't very frequent. You turn on a fossil generator to meet it, if you can't/don't from storage. It is a back-up or peaking load.

Furthermore, when you actually look at the occurrences of when solar+wind in any capacity/storage mix are unable to meet the demand, more of the occurrences happen under conditions where the total wind+solar output is substantial, indeed some of them happen at peak load, no surprise. The capacity optimization spreads them out statistically by allocating the fractions and placements of the generation, allocating storage vs generation.

The point you are not getting is "yeah, you need some backing/peaking capacity." It is NEVAR optimum to use nuclear power for that, capital costs are far too high. Look at the electric industry today -- peaking power comes from natural gas turbines -- lowest capital cost (also easiest siting).

That doesn't need to change ... indeed we can use EXISTING fossil plants to do this. The total CO2 flux is simply not an issue as long as the product of the power * duty cycle can be driven down to a small fraction of the total power and it can.

One of the big points here is that the "90% of the time" doesn't mean that the other 10% has zero solar+wind and large loads. You and others always jump to that absurd "conclusion." In fact some of that 10% has nearly infinitesimal solar+wind undersupply.

Yes, you need peaking/backup. Every system does. But that generation doesn't run very much and doesn't produce anything like total grid peak power when it does.

I wouldn't have expected this repartee from you. It's on par with "explain to me how 0.3% of the atmosphere can affect anything."...* wind and solar are statistically-complementary. Yeah, the sun doesn't shine at night. I knew that. I would have thought that you accepted that I knew that?

Just pointing out the obvious reason why the current model for excess capacity + essentially no storage has very little to do with a workable solar/wind solution. I accept that you know that, so I don't quite understand why you're making such a big deal about understanding the "pre-renewable system" as you call it.

Is there any reason why the spatial averaging needed to provide adequate solar + wind coverage would have anything to do with the spatial averaging needed to connect with enough excess fossil fuel capacity?

[There is some amount of electricity that has to be available 24/7, barring hurricanes, etc. Enough to run the heating system in people's houses, etc. 90% coverage by solar and wind at $0.10 per kWh, more or less, is not going to run those heating systems. That is base load if you will allow my definition. If you want to fuss about the terminology, then call it something else. It's a problem and will not go away because you have redefined the term we try to use to refer to it.

That load is LOW. And it isn't very frequent. You turn on a fossil generator to meet it, if you can't/don't from storage. It is a back-up or peaking load.

Furthermore, when you actually look at the occurrences of when solar+wind in any capacity/storage mix are unable to meet the demand, more of the occurrences happen under conditions where the total wind+solar output is substantial, indeed some of them happen at peak load, no surprise. The capacity optimization spreads them out statistically by allocating the fractions and placements of the generation, allocating storage vs generation.

The point you are not getting is "yeah, you need some backing/peaking capacity." It is NEVAR optimum to use nuclear power for that, capital costs are far too high. Look at the electric industry today -- peaking power comes from natural gas turbines -- lowest capital cost (also easiest siting).

That doesn't need to change ... indeed we can use EXISTING fossil plants to do this. The total CO2 flux is simply not an issue as long as the product of the power * duty cycle can be driven down to a small fraction of the total power and it can.

One of the big points here is that the "90% of the time" doesn't mean that the other 10% has zero solar+wind and large loads. You and others always jump to that absurd "conclusion." In fact some of that 10% has nearly infinitesimal solar+wind undersupply.

Yes, you need peaking/backup. Every system does. But that generation doesn't run very much and doesn't produce anything like total grid peak power when it does.

Yes, capital costs are high for nukes. What you refuse to accept is that they would cost around $0.11 p/kWh, cheaper than solar, because fuel costs are low.

And the load to heat and cool my house, run my tv and cable modem is not all that LOW. You know, those summer brownouts. Yes, peaking plants could supply it, if they weren't busy trying to supply every bit of juice the system has available during one of those summer brownouts. But I was talking about baseline load, just to keep the lights on, not peak load, which neither coal nor nuclear are good at.

Yes, capital costs are high for nukes. What you refuse to accept is that they would cost around $0.11 p/kWh, cheaper than solar, because fuel costs are low.

Shread... stop and think a moment. You are trying to tell me that nuclear power wins over solar because fuel costs are low? Really?

Where are these 0.11 c/KWH "advanced" nukes? You can assert they are cheaper than solar, but everyone else looks at the history of nuclear power over-runs and is skeptical ... to put it mildly. And by the tome one gets built, solar power will be considerably cheaper than it is now.

Quite beyond that, there's a point you don't seem to get, and I am sure you won't like. But the power pools don't work the old way/ Your idea is that you can keep this nuke turned on all the time, because "it's the baseline load provider." In the old days the state regulatory agencies actually could do that. Now it doesn't work that way.

What is the incremental cost of producing a watt of solar or wind, given that the system is installed? Near Zero.

What is the incremental cost of producing a watt of nuclear, given ditto? More, in fuel cost and radiation damage.

The result is that in a fair power pool, almost all of the wind and solar power will be dispatched before any Nuclear power is dispatched, and thos would be true even if the LCOE of wind or solar is higher than for nuclear!

You won't like it, but there is a reality: once put in place, wind or solar will undercut ANYTHING ELSE in a price war to sell electricity.

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And the load to heat and cool my house, run my tv and cable modem is not all that LOW. You know, those summer brownouts. Yes, peaking plants could supply it, if they weren't busy trying to supply every bit of juice the system has available during one of those summer brownouts. But I was talking about baseline load, just to keep the lights on, not peak load, which neither coal nor nuclear are good at.

Do you heat with electric? I doubt it. You may run fans as part of forced air, BFD.

I just can't resist posting a link to the following. Yes, its from TheRegister, the font of so much weirdness and snarky just-plain-wrong science coverage. The place where scientists are "boffins." However I must say personally I've always liked "boffin" ...

Bloomberg has sparked a brand-new debate about clean energy in Australia, releasing a report that suggests finance for new coal-fired power is going to be scarce because wind energy is now cheaper than constructing new fossil-fuel plants – even without subsidy.

The analysis, announced here, says Australia's major banks “are unlikely to finance new coal without a substantial risk premium due to the reputational damage of emissions-intensive investments – if they are to finance coal at all”*.

CEO of Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Michael Liebreich said that “The perception that fossil fuels are cheap and renewables are expensive is now out of date”, noting that wind farms are out-competing coal and gas in a country with “some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources”.

According to BNEF, a new wind farm in Australia can now deliver electricity at $AU80 per megawatt-hour, while electricity from a new gas baseload plant costs $AU116 per MWh, and coal-fired power arrives on the grid at $AU143 per MWh.

While those figures include the impact of the Australian government’s carbon price, the analysis suggests “wind energy is 14% cheaper than new coal and 18% cheaper than new gas”.

The sunk cost of existing power stations – most of which date to the 1970s and 1980s – means they are still the cheapest power source. Bloomberg predicts that large-scale solar PV will overtake both new coal and gas generation by 2020.

Folks, Australia is the world's largest coal exporter. And Australia has somewhat laxer emission control requirements for coal-fired power-plants than the US does. If you cannot make a new coal-fired power plant pay in Australia ... that really says something...

However Australia also has world-class wind and solar resources, in fact it's the only nation in the world that immediately comes to my mind as better-off than the US in this regard.

Yes, capital costs are high for nukes. What you refuse to accept is that they would cost around $0.11 p/kWh, cheaper than solar, because fuel costs are low.

The cost for new nuclear capacity for 2017 is moot, because it's too late to break ground and have it ready for 2017. If you want to talk about 2018 you need to cut the costs for solar accordingly. The solar juggernaut hurtles forward.

BadAndy wrote:

Where are these 0.11 c/KWH "advanced" nukes? You can assert they are cheaper than solar, but everyone else looks at the history of nuclear power over-runs and is skeptical ... to put it mildly. And by the tome one gets built, solar power will be considerably cheaper than it is now.

Beyond the initial handful of construction starts, I haven't really seen much new activity. The temptation is to think everyone is waiting until we know how much they really cost.

My suspicion is that that wait will be until after solar costs have fallen to the point is doesn't matter.

Is there any reason why the spatial averaging needed to provide adequate solar + wind coverage would have anything to do with the spatial averaging needed to connect with enough excess fossil fuel capacity?

I'm not even sure I know what you are asking, but to the degree I understand it the answer is

* new fossil generators tend to be around a GW or more.

* you need a power pool big enough so that the statistics of generators off line become attractive in terms of reducing the excess capacity of generators needed otherwise.

* it's unfortunate, but power-pool bidding collusion is widely documented, some by convictions, but much more by studies which show that it "must" be the case from price statistics, but this evidence is not sufficient for prosecution. Studies show that your power pool must have over 100 independent large bidders to become an "efficient market" statistically. This means that power-pools shouldn't be smaller than roughly 100 GW average load if a significant fraction of the bidders are 1 GW plants ... and that's a big power pool. This gets worse if big bidders operate multiple plants in the pool, which is commonly the case.

At the moment wind and solar providers are small bidders in most pools. In the future we may need to use anti-trust law to prevent entities from owning too much of the solar or wind assets in a bidding pool.

All of this argues for big grids. At the moment there are three good-sized pools in the US with the northeast being the largest in terms of power and number of generators. The northeast pool though doesn't have transmission capacity sufficient to allow any generator to supply power to any load; its internal distribution and bidding is thus quite complex. Auction "corners" can be achieved by controlling transmission too. The market and transport inefficiencies of power pools get very complex when the transmission is balkanized and marginal.

You are missing a few important points and don't understand the pre-renewable system

Like the condescendant tone. FYI I4m an EE with a specialization in power distribution (though I do not work in the field).

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the generation system has always maintained excess capacity larger than that!

No1) it doesn't maintain 3x the average load, extreme variations are handled by energy souces with a high fraction of regulating power (gas turbines, hydro...)2) unused capacity is "cheap" as it only implies overdiminsioning plants (capital costs) and running out of optimal range during peak periods. As long as the extra capacity is not needed, there are no associated fuel costs because the power is simply not produced.

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As to your first point: the whole point of this particular paper is that they do it for the atlantic region and they do it with a lot of storage, and the result is that the grid doesn't get substantially rebuilt.

The study assumes no transport losses and perfect connection between all points.

So of course it doesn't require the grid to be rebuilt, it starts with an imaginary one.

It also assumes that existing fossile fuel generators will be the same as today even if they are only used a couple of hours a year.

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As to your second point, no it doesn't change either, because the US is committed now to rational power-pools by fair auction.

Who is gonna tell a producer that they can only sell 1/3 of their production at a given time?

Who is going to manage the huge power storage installations?

Who is going to build the 3x more transmission lines needed to connect all this storage and distant generating fields?

The storage technology use in the article are also laughable, GIV and H2 storage is science fiction, lithium batteries have really bad caracteristics (nice power density). The actual technologies used in the field are ignored (hydro storage & liquid electrolytes batteries) and their cost reductions pulled out of a not so shiny place.

As I said the interesting part of the article is about the spatial and temporal averaging needed to achieve high availability wind power. The economic part is either trivial or unrealistic.

With regards to power systems, it seems to me the biggest limiting factor to a large percentage of renewable generation is the lack of frequency support provided by the renewable generators to the grid. This paper briefly discusses this.

Without some significant research and coordination between generators, transmission operators and other market participants, there will be a practical limit to the mix of generation technologies that has nothing to do with available wind or sun, or what the "base load" profile looks like for a given season. The politics of making this work strike me as problematic, given natural market competition.

The need for ancillary control schemes and frequency support generation will inevitably drive up the cost of generating power from renewables, though it is impossible to say by how much, as long as there is still "free" inertia in the system from traditional generation techniques that can be relied upon to keep grid frequency stable.